One of the truly great uses of the internet is the development of museums posting videos, lectures, biographical materials, et al, free to the public. Because I am on the National Gallery emailing list, every month I receive their newsletter letting me know how they might be of further assistance in my ongoing education of the fine arts. A few weeks ago I was informed that the 2003 Kirk Varnedoe Mellon Lectures, Pictures of Nothing, were being made available on the internet and as iPod broadcasts and that the six lectures were being posted one per week.
Prior to this announcement the only one of the Mellon Lectures known to me was Kenneth Clark’s, The Nude, which I have had in book form for many years. By coincidence I had just finished reading it for about the seventh or eighth time when this announcement was received.
Kirk Varnedoe was a name known to me for many years but a person I knew little about, despite my thirty years working in the New York City arts. On the website I learned that he had been the curator of painting and sculpture at MOMA as well as the curator of several exhibitions, none of which I had seen. I won’t list his full resume here, it is impressive, as that is available on the museum web page. I can also direct you to an archive of the Charlie Rose Show and to the interview in which Kirk Varnedoe explains how he made his decision to leave the museum and present these lectures. It has much to do with the fact that he died, at age 56, only a few months after having delivered them.
In his opening remarks he refers to the Mellon Lectures of 1956 by E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, a survey of the psychology of representation in art, and he states that it is his intention to do for abstraction what Gombrich did for representation. Because Kirk Varnedoe’s lectures were so inspiring, after hearing the third one I went to the internet and bought a copy of them so that I could follow the slides he was presenting which are reproduced in the book, and so that I could quickly read them all. And at the same time I bought as well a copy of the Gombrich lectures. When making art every gesture, every motion, every movement an artist makes requires the making of a decision and the dilemma of Representation versus Abstractions is perhaps the first brick wall the young artist comes up against in his career, if it is not indeed a career long preoccupation, as in the work of Will Barnet. How that crisis is resolved is one of the first steps toward the creation of a personal voice.
On a broader view the dilemma between representation and abstraction has been an unresolved ongoing debate in the fine arts in general. Neither Matisse nor Picasso forsook representation and neither made purely abstract art works. They remain the undisputed giants of the modern art world and their influence remains as strong today as it was during their lifetimes. But because abstraction was for so long considered the legitimate end game of representation subsequent artists have had to find their way. The exemplar here is Jackson Pollock who, when he studied with Thomas Hart Benton made drawings that looked like Thomas Hart Benton’s, or when he studied Picasso made paintings and drawings that looked like Picasso’s, and who one day dribbled the paint directly onto the canvas and achieved a moment that is probably only slightly less important to subsequent art than was cubism.
From the moment he begins to speak Mr. Varnedoe is a charismatic presence. He is charm personified and he addresses his audience respectfully as a congregation of well educated intelligent persons. His knowledge of art history is encyclopedic and he brings information and personal experience to the surface faster than a computer with dual processors. But what is so truly remarkable is that he speaks in complete sentences with a majestic command of the English language. Because his delivery is so fluid and easy I wondered if he was speaking extemporaneously and indeed the introduction to the book states, with a wonder equal to my own, that he was; he referred to only note cards and slides. As a depth of knowledge and a command of the language are achievements I appreciate, after the first lecture I was committed for the duration.
Each of the lectures is devoted more or less to one of the decades of the last half of the century. Without going into them in detail, I urge you to hear them on your own, I will cut to the finale and ask the obvious question: Did Mr. Varnedoe achieved his aim of making the case for abstraction? Sadly, and despite this wonderful theatrical performance, I have to conclude that he did not.
Beginning with Pollack’s drip paintings, Varnedoe uses that as the locus of the New York art scene, referring to them constantly during all of the lectures. He contrasts that with Jasper John’s Flag, which he considers a reaction to Pollock’s work and proceeds to insist that abstraction of the last half of the century was created within this dichotomy of those two ways of thinking.
I was surprised that there was little retrospective summary of the years 1900 to 1950, that nothing was said about the dichotomy of the Munich/Paris art world of the beginnings of the century. Abstraction had, when these lectures were given, a one hundred year history and we are guided through only parts of it during the second half of that history. Because so much is missing these lectures read, ultimately, as an example of cultural relativism, as an advertisement for the New York School, and very likely, even if unwittingly, as an apologia of his tenure at MOMA.
In the late 1940’s Henry Luce, the publisher of Time/Life, made his pronouncement: This is the American Century. And indeed when we consider the same years that Kirk Varnedoe covers in these lectures we can see that it was the American Century; we had the world’s strongest economy and the most powerful military. In that environment our culture would obviously have world influence as well …think Hollywood films, rock and roll, and blue jeans, etc.
As the only world class city in the United States, New York would of course be the self proclaimed cultural fine arts center of the American Century, (Chicago was our only other possibility) Having lived in New York from 1959 to 1992 I can attest to the super abundant and rich fine art cultural life there. But I have often questioned the claims made for the superiority of the New York cultural world and have just as often considered it merely the self aggrandizement of those who thought of themselves as King of the Hill. I have found it hard to believe that a society that is outside this urban elite would produce, by inference, only second rate art, whether domestic or foreign, when the truth is to the contrary …think Francis Bacon, Fellini, Peter Brook, Pedro Amodovar, Pina Bausch, Shoji Hamada, Samuel Beckett. I believe that New York was the art capitol only because of its combative New York self assertiveness and its propinquity to corporate wealth. When the world situation changes the cultural capitol will move.
In defense of my view I can point out that some have already proclaimed the 21st Century as the Chinese Century and if you follow the pages of the current art journals you will see that Chinese modern art is quickly achieving the status of Cultural Capitol and that the prestige, and more typically, the money, the corporate money, is shifting to the Far East: let us keep in mind that China will soon be the world’s largest economy, that the Chinese army now numbers in the millions, and that China will likely have the first colony on the moon. Will that dominance make modern Chinese art good? Better than other art?
This narrow focus on the New York art scene brought to mind Bernard Berenson’s far broader work on the Italian renaissance. During the Italian renaissance the world of painting and sculpture fell into several schools of thought; the school of Florence, the school of Rome and the school of Venice. If he had set out to make the case for Italian renaissance art and had spoken only about the school of Venice, we would know nothing about Michelangelo, Leonardo, or Raphael. From these lectures we know nothing about Kandinsky, Diebenkorn, Calder, Morandi, Hans Hoffman, Lucian Freud, Joan Mitchell, et al, nor is there a whiff of a mention of the Latin American painters who have produced some of the greatest art of this same period.
In 2007 I happened upon an exhibition of the Bank of America photography collection, Made in Chicago, formerly the La Salle Bank Collection, at the Chicago Cultural Center and I was stunned that such great photographic works existed and without wide, national, public recognition. One of the photographs in particular interested me and through the internet I was able to contact the photographer and I bought a copy of that work. In a series of exchanges with him through the email I asked why he thought those Chicago photographers had such low name recognition, Harry Callahan was among them, wondering if perhaps it was because they worked outside the boundaries of the New York art scene. He replied that that might have been the case but that more than that he thought it was because of their inherent Midwestern reticence …all of them were Midwesterners.
I am a Midwesterner, I am socially reticent, and so I could accept that easy explanation as probably the most likely answer. When I considered if any of the artists Mr. Varnedoe describes might have been Midwestern, I realized that they were not. Wherever they might have come from to New York, reticence was not their style. Indeed, they had that New York energy and drive that can best be described as a will to power. And so when I ask what these artists might have had in common that created a bond between them and that bundled them together into an art movement, I was aware that the will to power is the best easy explanation. And while Kirk Varnedoe describes in detail the work and the world in which these artists lived I was too much aware that he was omitting this psychological component in their success: they are well known not just because of their work but because they were driven to make their mark in their professional field, they were driven by self aggrandizement, aided and abetted by dealers and critics with a vested interest; none of them was surprised by having the mantle of greatness laid upon them.
I specifically mention Harry Callahan because I think few of the artists featured in these lectures, contrary to their publicity; have achieved a level of fine art in their work the equal of Mr. Callahan’s. Let me ask again: Why isn’t he as famous as they are?
That makes me wonder if there might not be undiscovered artists of great stature outside the New York School. Varnedoe briefly mentions the Design Institute in 1940’s Chicago, where Callahan taught. Founded by Moholy Nagy as the American Baus Haus the influence of that school and that art philosophy has had wide ranging dispersal in the United States; the Black Mountain School, RISD, Alfred University, Parsons, The Art Student’s League in New York, the Santa Fe community, and through generations of students from there and elsewhere through those associations. It is very likely that the art produced by those persons is the American art that Alfred Stieglitz championed. I am certain it exists. Where is it?
I suspect the answer lies in the fact that the United States is a land of conformity and that museums toe the mark and walk the walk with the same modus operandi; they all show similar works by the same 37 modern artists in the same museum configuration. Neither originality nor individuality is an objective of any American art museum. (I have visited 100 American art museums.)
Although the artists within the camp Kirk Varnedoe describes concerned themselves with developing a signature image, we learn here that nothing actually stands on its own, nothing “good” that is. As here described this is an art that is incestuous and shallow; Judd: what you see is what you see: Johns: my work isn’t about anything. If it is about anything it is only about the work of others in the New York school. However: if indeed it truly is about nothing I can’t understand why we have been asked to sit through six hours of lectures in which nothing else but that will be discussed. Mr. Varnedoe counters by saying that when confronted with what seems to be nothing, we need to learn to look more closely. I don’t know that that works every time. I see many, many pictures of nothing in my local small town art gallery year after year and frankly few of them are worth more than the statistical thirty seconds of attention. In thirty years of gallery going in NYC I have seen my share of pictures of nothing unworthy of the same thirty seconds.
It is regrettable that he has ignored a broader view, regrettable because he speaks so well for modern art.
In his favor I can say that art does beget art and Mr. Varnedoe insists that the only way to evaluate modern or abstract art is to ascertain if it references other art. I agree with that; a genre of painting only has validity if it is contemporary to the time in which the genre came to the fore; the genre itself only has validity if it enters into a dialogue with the larger tradition, i.e., the tradition in western or eastern art.
Outsider art uses the materials and the techniques of professional artists but it references only the compelling mental content that motivates the work. There are some truly great art works in the outsider movement, many of them visual experiences with great impact, but thus far the art world has not found that a sufficiently valid argument for awarding the outsiders work with the status of fine art.
T.S.Eliot has written that it is the artist’s responsibility to bring forth order where none seems apparent. I have always disagreed with that. The social conservatives tell us that if we do not impose strong law and order we will live in a state of social anarchy. While I am a liberal to the left of Nader, I do accept that: anarchy is our natural state. Furthermore, as a result of the Big Bang, the universe, despite its randomly clumping into patterns, is nothing but an immense field of chaos. I believe it is the artist’s responsibility to help us live in that chaos.
When I visited the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh a few years ago I was made aware that Andy Warhol, who is respectfully included in these lectures, was a proponent of chaos. His works are a thumbing of the nose at the rules of art making and art theory. His art works are art works despite the rules….he shows us that it is possible both to live with chaos and to be successful. For all of his posturing as an art world village idiot he was extremely well versed in art history and each of his works is a dialogue with western art equally as much as are Picasso’s works. One of the hallmarks then of any fine art is that it references other art, the canon, not exclusively Pollack’s, and that it engages in that ongoing dialogue.
The secret to understanding Warhol’s achievement, I am convinced, is to see it, not as individual pictures of nothing, but as I did …in large numbers. As isolated works, one here, one there, the breadth of his understanding cannot be grasped. The opposite is true of Jasper Johns: standing alone, each of his works has visual interest and an intriguing presence. But seen in large installations, such as Jasper Johns Gray at the Metropolitan a few years ago, or Johns 40 years of Printmaking, which I saw in San Francisco, the work soon cloys, it is seen to be indeed about nothing, and in a exhibition in several galleries, by the middle of the second one has had enough.
Dan Flavin also works best in large installments: I saw the career retrospective in Chicago in 2005 and thought it one of the most exciting art experiences of my lifetime. But one of his fluorescent fixtures leaning against the wall by itself in any other art gallery looks ridiculous. That is the fault of museums and galleries who should know better.
Cy Twombly alone of this school works well alone or in a grouping.
If I have any complaint about Mr. Varnedoe’s commentary it is that it is too often rendered in the over wrought museum speak of the contemporary art world … wherein the Guggenheim staff can always be recognized by the over use of the word “fraught”. While I was delighted by and carried along with his enthusiasm, works here are too often over described in an emotional exuberance that borders bombast.
In particular I heard with near disbelief the comments made about Donald Judd and Frank Stella. I know that Judd was a prominent figure in the New York art world. I know that he promoted himself to a very lofty plane. Yet when I see his work it raises the question cited here by Mr. Varnedoe: “Is this a joke?” and while I think the work was not intended as such it has that feeling about it. For the most part Judd …and Stella …made decoration …Le Corbusier defines decoration as the pleasant arrangement of familiar things. And in the end I see Judd’s work in particular as merely the illustration of a polemic written during a not very interesting moment in art history.
In Art and Illusion Mr. Gombrich asks two questions: why is representation different in different ages and cultures, and why does art have a history. The answer, he shows us, is that art is the result of two impulses; matching and making, matching that which is accepted within each culture and making something that goes beyond that accepted norm, which is the rarer impulse, conformity being the rule always and everywhere it seems.
Mr. Varnedoe asks essentially one question: why abstraction? As it regards the works he describes I am unconvinced that abstraction is a valid art form. I can’t say that I dislike it. I admire a lot of it …Martin, Twombley, Flavin, Warhol, Turrell, Serra. Other than those I see it primarily as an area of exploration that is generally too subjective and of such narrow focus, especially as here presented, that its achievement is less than the claim that is made for it. Among artist who are not discussed here …Rothko, Stuart Davis, Clifford Still, etc …I often feel that once they have created an iconic image they have concerned themselves with merely churning out product for America’s many collectors and museums. It is always sad to me to see people who have locked themselves in boxes. By contrast I admire other intellectuals …Darwin, Freud, Jung, Karl Jaspers …who show us in their work that their worldview is endogenous and that their intellectual curiosity is its unfolding.
Gombrich makes it evident to us that the most engaging art works are those that require the viewer to participate in the completion of the work. By telling us everything Varnedoe has left nothing to the imagination. When it is such an easy evening of homework to know everything explains, perhaps, why the abstraction he champions creates no lingering iconic image; knowing now what it is all about, we are ready to move on to the next historic episode.
While listening to the conclusion of these lectures, I recalled that Clement Greenberg, the pre-eminent critic and champion of this school of art, defined the easily digestible as kitsch. I think we might infer from his essay that kitsch has an appeal not only to the pettite bourgeois but in a different form to the cultural elite as well.
I offer my comments because I would like to encourage others to hear these lectures, and to read the book if so inclined. I am aware that the arguments for or against them are likely in the past. But I would remind you that they were delivered in 2003, nine years ago and that not much water has gone over the dam in the interim: everyone mentioned here is now old or dead but no young Turk has since usurped the throne. Perhaps that nine year period should be seen as a period of stasis, the lull before the storm of China ascending the throne. (Should I pronounce this lull the decadent end of the western tradition?) When seen from that different perspective, the Chinese, what will we think then of abstraction? Or, for that matter, representation? I believe familiarity with Mr. Gombrich’s lectures will help us appreciate Eastern art both old and new, but if abstraction has validity as a universal form of human expression that subsumes cultural differences, Mr. Varnedoe has failed to tell us why.
Despite my disclaimer, I urge you to hear them.
The Museum Mellon Lectures web pages …scroll down about half the page.
http://www.nga.gov/podcasts/mellon/index.shtm
The Charlie Rose Interview:http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/2442
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